Get Lost in the Internet’s Mind-Bending, Math-Inspired Art

That enigmatic smile, drawn here with a single line. This illustration, commissioned by Bill Cook at University of Waterloo, is a solution to the Traveling Salesman Problem. Robert Bosch

Artists have long used mathematics as part of their palette: the geometric patterns in Islamic architectural motifs, M.C. Escher’s tesselations. Maybe it’s the order that appeals—we use math to organize the world, with our engineered skyscrapers and Excel spreadsheets, and art reacts to that organization. Or maybe it’s simply because math describes nature, and nature is beautiful. Today’s artists, using both new technologies such as 3-D printing and traditional media such as textiles, are no different than their forebears. Here are five math-inspired artists and organizations that inspire us.

Follow Robert Bosch on TwitterRobert Bosch can draw the Mona Lisa with a single line. First he lays down some dots on a grayscale version of the image, and then he uses an algorithm to connect the dots in a way looks like the original. Basically, he turns classic paintings into a version of the famous Traveling Salesman Problem: given a set of points, how do you trace a path that looks like Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can? It’s not the shortest path, but it’s definitely the coolest one.

What do English, slangy, and pentasyllabic have in common? They are all autological words: Each word’s meaning describes the word itself.

Think about it.

Henry Segerman, a professor at Oklahoma State University, takes this kind of meta self-referencing to a new dimension with his mathematically inspired art. He makes ambigrams—letters written in a way that if you turn them, they look the same—and autologlyphs—a hybrid of autological words and ambigrams, like a Möbius strip with an ambigram of the word “Möbius” on it. Kinda like a mathematical pun.

Andrea Hawksley uses everyday materials like pipe cleaners, fabric, and scrap packaging to make DIY math art. From sand-castle versions of Sierpinski’s Triangle to a skirt based on hyperbolic geometry, Hawksley’s projects might just inspire you to craft something with your extra Q-tips.

Nerds who like to snuggle, look no further. Ashforth tweets the mathematical backstories of her optical illusion afghans and binary number throws. You’ll fall down the (angora) rabbit hole and want to learn to knit so that you can make hyperbolic hats and tessellation cushions for all your cold weather needs. Ashforth and her husband Steve Plummer, a matheknitician power couple, also run a site called Woolly Thoughts where you can buy patterns for their clever designs.

Mathemartists (see, we can partake in portmanteau shenanigans too) have been gathering at the Bridges annual conference since 1998 to share their work. The conference’s Twitter account has a nice running inventory of a lot of math-y art out there. If short movies about the math behind snowflakes and dance workshops based on binary are your thing, pack your bags for this year’s conference in Baltimore at the end of the month. For one day of the conference, the exhibit and movie festival is open to the public.

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Food-y Feeds to Inspire Your Thanksgiving Feast

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The country’s most iconic food holiday, Thanksgiving, is coming up, which means it’s time for cooks everywhere to begin the debates: brined or deep-fried turkey? (Salted and spatchcocked, if you please.) Sweet potatoes with marshmallows or something more, uh, sophisticated? (We’re going for chipotle powder, olive oil, and sea salt.) Is it really so bad if the pumpkin in your pie comes from a can? (Not at our table.) Whether you’re a first-timer looking to learn the basics or a confident cook aiming to up your game, these feeds will ensure your guests don’t escape to the powder room and desperately scan for options on Seamless.

Follow The New York Times’ Food section on the web
The Old Gray Lady’s cooking section is creative, comprehensive, and voluminous, with more than 17,000 recipes. This year, don’t miss the site’s interactive Thanksgiving menu planner, which asks you questions about your guests and cooking ability, and then makes suggestions about what to cook. (On my site-generated menu: kasha with squash and pomegranate, brandied pumpkin pie, and hashed Brussels sprouts.) Save dishes you like to a central recipe box, accessible via both the website and the NYT’s mobile apps. For more regular inspiration, subscribe to the site’s email newsletters, which combine engaging writing with links to recipes you will actually make.

Follow Serious Eats on Twitter
This food nirvana for science nerds will fill your Twitter feed with everything from tips for organizing your kitchen while entertaining to, yes, the ultimate flaky pie crust. In the site’s special Thanksgiving podcast, authors Stella Parks and J. Kenji Lopez-Alt solve angst-y cooks’ issues by suggesting recipes and techniques. And before you decide what to do with this year’s bird, read Lopez-Alt’s substantive critique of brining turkey.

Follow Epicurious on the web
Full disclosure: Epicurious is owned by WIRED parent company Condé Nast. But it remains the Internet’s first recipe website. Sure, it has the cooking gear tips, the advice from experts, the bajillions of great dishes, and the commenters who are mostly not lunatics. But it also has this Cranberry Sauce with Port and Dried Figs, a staple of my family holiday dinner for more than a decade, and that alone makes the site worth a visit.

Follow America’s Test Kitchen on YouTube
Some of us learned to cook before we could pull up videos on demand showing the proper way to julienne, and the results weren’t pretty. Thankfully, you can now binge-watch how-tos and learn everything you need for a stellar meal without losing a knuckle. America’s Test Kitchen has thoughtfully collected its Thanksgiving-themed videos into one playlist.

Follow Food 52 on the web
If your holiday menu feels tired, try the Thanksgiving menu planner at Food52, the crowd-sourced recipe site founded by former New York Times food editor Amanda Hesser. Pick a Thanksgiving staple, and Food52 will present you with variations: Do you like your spuds mashed, roasted, or crispy? Like your stuffing custard-y, meaty, or would you prefer a gratin (or, for that matter, lasagna)? The site presents several recipes for each answer. On my to-try list: Tuscan onion confit in addition to ye olde cranberry sauce, and Dorie Greenspan’s chocolate mousse for gluten-free guests.

Forces of Nature to Follow if You’re Stuck at Your Desk

If you, as we also do, spend the day at your desk (or co-working station or coffee shop) slinging electrons around, adding value, optimizing synergies between stakeholders, paravirtualizing the hypervisor, and updating your Tinder account, you’re probably not thinking much about nature. The air, the water, the soft earth between your toes, the gentle caress of the evening air as the temperature begins to fall and the heat of the day fades away…After all, the warm beams of sun on your face aren’t going to get you any closer to discovering a cure for gluten intolerance or finishing that app that’s going to be the Uber for tubas are they? No they are not.

We’re not going to urge you to put the phone down and go outside for a change, but we are going to urge you to at least follow these forces of nature on Twitter. You’ll still be trapped in a Gorilla Glass-lined cave, but at least you’ll see the flickering shadows of reality on the touchscreen in front of you.

Follow @KarlTheFog
T.S. Eliot had yellow fog that rubbed its back upon the window-panes and licked its tongue into the corners of the evening. San Francisco has a weightless overlord that rolls in from the sea, engulfing the Marina and the Presidio alike. He chills us to the bone and makes us wish we had brought a fleece, but he also protects us from the scorching inland temperatures. He giveth and he taketh away; like the tide he ebbs and flows across the Golden Gate Bridge. He’s the reason you can’t make assumptions about what the weather will be like today, the way you can in cities of a more constant clime. You might not go outside very much, but he’s a wry reminder that outside exists.

Follow the SunThis guy, man. It’s just the same thing every day. “Hello Los Angeles! I will be with you for 13 hours, 11 minutes.” Montreal, you get 13 hours, 48 minutes today. Suck it Tokyo, only 10 hours, 43 minutes for you. Always the same, always assuming we care that he’s in Dublin or Mumbai or wherever the hell he has decided to grace with his tweetings on a particular day. I mean, do I tweet about the fact that I will be leaving the house at 8:09 and catching the 8:22 bus and arriving at work at 9:12 day after day? I don’t because you know what? That’s boring. So follow the moon too. Like any good satellite player, he’s helpful and kind. He describes various phenomena in which he is involved (hello Supermoon diagrams) and he retweets people. Like a friend, a pal, and not some droning megalomaniac who thinks the world revolves around him.

Follow Greenland FjordLike most forces of nature with Twitter accounts, he has a tendency to be a little self referential. (Recent tweet: New Paper: “Modeling Turbulent Subglacial Meltwater Plumes: Implications for Fjord-Scale Buoyancy-Driven Circulation”). But he’s also super duper depressing—a constant reminder that the ice is melting and it is not coming back. His pal Polar Ice Cap was just as depressing (if more humorous) but he seems to have stopped tweeting. Maybe his fingers calved off and were lost to the sea.

Follow SF Quake Bot (or other quake bot in an area of your choosing)
So you know how, when you first learned about the microbiome, you went through a period of mild (or acute if you’re the hand-sanitizer type) disgust? Because germs are all over you right now, and many of them are the poop kind. But then you pulled yourself together and looked around and you realized that you’re not dead yet, so maybe all those little guys aren’t so bad. This is that, but for earthquakes. At first you’re like “Holy crap, I’m about to be sucked into the earth and crushed by tectonic plates.” And then you get more quaketweets and more and more and you realize that they’re harmless parts of your personal ecosystem, happening to you all the time, mostly outside the scope of your perception, but doing good, in their own way. (Until the big one hits, of course. You do have an earthquake bag under your desk, don’t you?)

Follow @LionsHeadCPT
This mountain is undoubtedly the most hostile landmass in South Africa. But don’t hold it against him. He’s been abused. Someone shot a porno on him earlier this year. Without his consent! So maybe he’s got issues. Some size issues maybe, what with the Everest jokes, and jealousy problems as well—he got very pouty when Daniel Radcliffe hiked a competing mountain earlier this year. Do not date.

Follow The Tweet of God
God is on Twitter and He is pissed off at us for screwing up this nice planet He gave us, shooting each other with guns, refusing to grant marriage licenses, and generally being jerks. Also, He’s occasionally hilarious.

The Best Oooey Gooey, Kid-Friendly Science on the Web

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So the kids are back in school [Sit down right now and eat your breakfast.] and you actually really like the science [Yes you do have to eat all your scrambled eggs.] curriculum at your local elementary [Stop touching your brother.] school.

They have a little garden [I don’t care if he looked at you first, keep your hands to yourself.] which is cute, and they use it [Do not just leave that strawberry on the floor to get smooshed! Pick it up right now.] to do little things with butterflies and growing [Put your shoes on.] beans and there’s a little worm cultivation [You should have put your shoes in the basket when you took them off, why don’t you look there.] operation going on, which is gross [Shoes, please, immediately.] but the kids get a kick out of it.

And one of the portable classrooms [Yes you do have to wear socks, put your socks on, put them on right now, and then PUT. YOUR. SHOES. ON.] is now a lab, which is great. But you’d like the little unshod darlings to get some extra credit, too. Check out these feeds for a little kid-friendly science on the side. [Ok, bye sweetie, have a good day at school.]

Follow Doctor Mad Science on YouTube
For kids whose parents are willing to let them try this at home. Recent projects include putting grapes in a microwave (plasma arc!), a tinfoil-match-and-lighter based rocket (this one looks very fun and dangerous, do not attempt if living in a western drought-plagued state), a thing where you light a tea bag on fire and it floats through the air in your kitchen (good for setting the cat ablaze), and a thing with dry ice (not as hand-freezey-offy as liquid nitrogen, right?). Warnings to make sure the kids have proper supervision pop up on screen occasionally, and I’m sure they are always heeded by shock-haired 7-year-olds.

Watch Crash Course Kids on YouTube
Geared to fifth graders (but I think likely interesting to curious younger kids too), this video series is divided into areas like Earth Science, Life Science, Space Science etc. Viewers get a quick overview of topics like gravity, water (salt vs fresh), conservation of matter (illustrated with Lego bricks) and so forth. It’s pretty structured, with episodes building upon each other, so best to watch them in order. Suggested by Lucia Espino.

Follow Live Science
So Lisa Merkle suggested we recommend Live Science, and I was skeptical at first. It always seemed to me to be a bit of the id of science sites. You know, force-fed egyptian bird mummies and drone melting lasers and Mars hoaxes. I mean, they’re not bad stories. But I can’t shake the thought of: “Oh I know this super-Stonehenge story is totally catering to the scientist-who-also-kinda-loves-Bat-Boy in me, but you know what, I will click it anyway.” So I thought, hey, maybe that’s not so good for kids. But that’s me just being a jerk. This site is GREAT for kids. Which are nothing but unregulated ids, after all. Older kids would get the most out of this, probably, but when they’re not memorizing facts about leopards, you can coach them (and I suppose incept them with a little healthy cynicism) on how web sites game them for clicks.

Follow Science Sparks
What’s good about this site is that you can pick experiments to do based on your kid’s age, and the descriptions are very easy to follow (with plenty of foamy, gooey fun). This is an English operation, but don’t hold that against them—they cater to the American segment of their audience. They’ve got a nice collection of Halloween-based experiments, for instance, including two recipes for fake blood (one clots and scabs up, the other does not). Yeech.

Follow Wild Krats on Netflix (or wherever)Did you know that giraffes fight with their necks? Did you know that yeti crabs live near thermal vents and harvest bacteria? Did you know that the golden bamboo lemur eats bamboo? Did you know that beavers make houses of mud and sticks to live in? Did you know that the peregrine falcon is the fastest bird in the world? Did you know that if an elephant’s mom is killed by poachers they will not learn to survive in the wild? Did you know that platypuses have electro-sense? Did you know that snakes have heat sensors to detect their prey?

If your kid watches this TV show, they will retain all these facts. And they will share them with you on an endless loop.

The Coolest Obscure Science You Don’t Know About Yet

NASA

A lot of cool work in science flies under the radar, lost in the weekly outpouring of research or hidden in texts with obscure names. This Friday, we encourage you to dip your toes in five different journals that you may not have heard of before. But the science in their pages affects everything from Google maps to alleviating pain in your daily life. Check them out and hopefully you’ll want to make them a regular stop.

When a plane lands on a runway instead of on the dry grass fifty feet to the right, it’s because geodesy has got your back. When you road trip across the United States and you take a selfie with every twine ball in America, geodesy was right there with you. It’s the study of the size and shape of the Earth and the orientation of points in space. See, every point on this planet has an address or code given to it by geodesists. And as the Earth’s tectonic plates shift around and moon and sun gravity cause its surface to rise and fall, geodesists follow that movement and update locations of specific landmarks and points on your maps. You might start with a recent paper, “Why the Greenwich meridian moved.” Yup, now when you go to the Greenwich meridian, which is the all-important original reference line for both longitude and time, you actually have to walk 335 feet east to get to zero degrees longitude as determined today by GPS. For more on the secrets beneath your very feet, find geophysics headlines curated by geophysicists at @GeophysicsRR and the American Geophysical Union, @theAGU.

If Icarus had flown as close to the sun as the story claims, he would have been flapping his wings of feather and wax in space. And that’s what a lot of scientists who publish in this journal might like to do. As they explore (from Earth) our solar system and any others nearby, they regularly get to geek out about the most epically awesome space phenomena. One recent special issue focused on research about Saturn and its enormous posse of moons, based on photos and data gathered by the Cassini satellite. Cassini has been flying around Saturn since 1997, and during the mission’s next couple of years, the satellite will make about two dozen passes of some of Saturn’s smaller, weirder moons: Daphnis, Telesto, Epimetheus and Aegaeon. So much drama happening in their neck of the rings. God, it’s just like get your own orbit, you know? Keep up with Cassini’s journey @CassiniSaturn. And if you feel like you want to be real up on the rest of the solar system gossip, it does have a Twitter account, @The_SolarSystem.

Nature has solved a lot of issues already. Like how to pollinate and make honey. Together, the bee and the flower have evolved to solve the issues of makin’ babies and makin’ food. Computer scientists want to capitalize on those solutions, but replicating nature with 0s and 1s is … not so easy. And that’s what this journal is for, a forum for scientists who want to capture evolution onto a circuit board. It has the best list of topic interests, including Artificial Immune Systems, Particle Swarms, Bacterial Foraging, Artificial Bees, Harmony Search, and Artificial Life. Follow Elsevier @comp_science for Swarm news—new issue and paper announcements—and to learn about other approaches to making more intelligent artificial machines.

Reading the articles in this journal will make you reach for the Advil. Whether you have chronic back pain, headaches, muscle soreness, or gout, these are the researchers trying to ease your fits and spasms. Within the pages of this journal, scientists explore the origin, mechanisms, and treatment of pain as well as the presence of pain in Americans. A study in the August 2015 issue found that 25.3 million adults suffer from daily, chronic pain. That’s about 1 in 10 adults. Though scientists are mapping the pain pathways going in your nervous system and your brain, it’s slow-going. You could feel more or less pain based on genetics, personal fears, and how much you sleep. To keep up with developments in pain, follow them on Twitter. This journal has a pretty good feed, highlighting Editor’s choice articles from current and archived issues.

Inanimate Objects You Really Should Follow on Twitter

Jason Major/MSSS/JPL-Caltech/NASA

Sometimes you follow someone on Twitter, someone you know, only to find that you don’t like them as much as you thought you did. And thus do tweets—especially tweetstorms—lead to familiarity, familiarity leads to contempt, and contempt leads to unfollowing. Better to follow things for which it is difficult to feel contempt, things without feelings, things that predictably inspire you to chuckle, feel enlightened, or plunge you into the depths of existential despair. In other words, inanimate things.

Follow @MarsCuriosity
The loneliest entity in the solar system slow-rolls across the landscape, a desiccated, barren, unyielding landscape that is pebbled with the corpses of its fallen comrades. Most humans would have gone insane by now, muttering “I am just going outside and may be some time” to the patient shipboard computer and trudged, brain numbed by isolation and despair, through the nanofabric airlock and into their certain swift merciful death.

Follow @520_bridge
So he’s a bridge and he lives in Seattle and people drive across him and he tweets about traffic and lack of traffic and other bridges, ‘cos he’s a nice guy, oh, and obviously he tweets about tolls. If he were a person who lived next door to you, he’d water his lawn (except in California, where he would not water his lawn) and he’d pick up your newspaper when you were out of town. But here is the thing you need to know about the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge (the formal name for the 520). This is a bridge that floats, and there’s something terrifying about that.

But I suspect this bridge of something more terrifying still. See, there used to be another floating bridge in the area. And in 1990 there was a storm. And during that storm, the Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge sank. And curiously, 10 years before, there was also a storm. And during that storm the previously floating Hood Canal Bridge sank as well. But the 520, has it sunk? No, it has not. Which is….interesting. Just think about that and maybe start locking your doors (and if you are a floating bridge, you should watch your back).
(Suggested by Elliott Smith)

Cli-Fi—That’s Climate Fiction—Is the New Sci-Fi

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Extreme weather events, changes in precipitation levels, species migration and extinction—climate change promises so many fun things. But why wait? See what that world will be like tomorrow by hopping on the climate fiction train today. Popularized by writers like Paolo Bacigalupi and Margaret Atwood, cli-fi takes climate predictions to their logical conclusions and explores how people might survive in a completely messed up world. Delve into that growing genre community by exploring the resources below, perhaps with a nice cup of tea.

Follow @MargaretAtwood on Twitter
Queen Atwood has often discussed the value of writing about climate change in fiction. (If you haven’t read her MaddAddam trilogy, drop everything but your e-book. Fall into a world of radical genetic engineering and climate change, where a jungle overflows with glowing green rabbits and a few human survivors wander the wilderness.) Her Twitter feed is a trove of interviews, literary and science news, environmental activism, and breezy jokes. Here’s a cheer she posted for Pope Francis after his encyclical: “Go! Go! Where? Where? We gotta #green #Pope, Over there!”

Follow @EcoFiction on Twitter
For straight-up recs, this feed spreads the word about climate change and nature-themed lit and art. On the home site you can scroll through the growing database of cli-fi and other eco-fiction tropes. And if all the talk of apocalypse gives you a sad, try solarpunk, an optimistic sub-genre in which technology helps us escape climate dystopia. Start with The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Explore asknature.org
Maybe you want to write your own novel, complete with strange creatures and technologies. I give you asknature.org, a database about how nature works. Q: How do polar bears stay warm? A: Clear, hollow, transparent hairs direct sunlight to dark pigmented skin and blubber that store the heat. The upper layer of white fur prevents heat and infrared rays from escaping. If you’re writing a climate opus, recast that adaptation into white onsies that spies can wear to slip through infrared detection. And that’s just one suggestion on the polar bear page. Mix, match, and enjoy.

Listen to the “After Water” Series on Soundcloud
Treat your ears to this collection of stories about the future of the Great Lakes region. WBEZ brought writers and scientists together to explore the science of water resources, and the writers then produced short pieces describing the region decades from now when fresh water could be scarce. The first story, by author Nnedi Okorafor, is set in Chicago’s South side: A girl finds comfort swimming with blue, bioluminescent fish in the polluted Rainbow Beach waterfront. The opening splash of water will have you hooked.

Read “Where the River Runs Dry” by David Owen
In the May 25 issue of The New Yorker, Owen follows the Colorado river south down its entire length, tracking the ever more desperate water crisis as he goes. Take the mouth of Colorado River—it no longer exists, bottoming out in the desert as a creek so narrow you can step over it. Between that and the arcane but essential discussion about water rights, it sounds like an excerpt from The Water Knife to us, too. The gap between climate fiction and climate non-fiction is apparently much smaller than we would like to think.

How to Explore the Ocean’s Depths Without Leaving Your Desk

Humans have spent years in space and days on the moon. We’ve even got a little rover roaming around Mars, taking adorable selfies. But we’ve explored less than 5 percent of the vast depths of our oceans. (And they’re really, really deep: Off the coast of Guam, the ocean floor is so far down you could drop Mount Everest in there and still have a mile to spare.) That’s either sad or exciting—there’s so much exploring left to do! And we’d better hurry. Pollution, overfishing, global warming, and invasive species are endangering and killing off some sea creatures before we even get to know them, the world’s great coral reefs are withering, and rising sea levels are encroaching on our shores. Thankfully, plenty of humans have devoted their time to studying—and safeguarding—the mysteries of the deep. Here’s how you can join them while seated on dry land, in front of your computer.

There’s more of where that came from in the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Instagram feed, which is full of otters, cuttlefish, seahorses, and ridiculous sunfish that look like Picasso paintings gone wrong. There are baby octopi, too.

The creatures in their collection have a dual purpose: You’ll squee over them, and then you’ll feel an urge to protect them. And that’s where the aquarium’s Seafood Watch app comes in—the tool makes it easy to track which kinds of seafood are ok to eat, and which kinds are overfished and no good for the ocean and environment. (Bluefin tuna, ptooey!)

Google Map’s Ocean ‘Street’ Views
If you don’t have the time (or are too afraid of flying) to brave the 15-hour flight to Australia’s Great Barrier reef, you can visit it from your desk. The Caitlin Seaview Survey and Google have teamed up to photograph the ocean’s many reef ecosystems in 360-degree views that’ll make you feel like you’re swimming with the fishes. Poke around a shipwreck off the coast of Aruba. Stare down humpback whales near the Cook Islands. Take in the electric colors of the Outer Devil’s Crown in Galapagos. The Seaview project is also creating an invaluable database that scientists can use to track the health of the world’s coral, recording wins—and losses—resulting from changes in our ocean’s ever-warming temperature.

David Shiffman’s ‘Why Sharks Matter’ Twitter Feed
‘Tis the season. It’s the tail end of Shark Week, that venerable (and sometimes scientifically questionable) tradition on the Discovery Channel. So for a taste of real shark science, spend some time on biologist David Shiffman’s Twitter feed. If you can’t already tell from his handle, Shiffman loves sharks and passionately defends their right to roam the oceans and fill your head with that Jaws theme music whenever you think about them. And by the way, Great Whites are so 2004. He wants to see more of the underdogs:

The Echinoblog by Biologist Chris Mah
Sharks are amazing. But the ocean’s invertebrates, from the most microscopic plankton to pulsating throngs of neon jellyfish, deserve attention, too. They are, after all, vital parts of the ocean’s complex food chain and delicate ecosystem. Enthusiastic biologist Chris Mah explores the incredible lives and diversity of the ocean’s invertebrates with a lot of exclamation marks. Just on his own, he’s identified 24 new species of starfishes, and he maintains a taxonomy of starfish genera. Mah can also tell you about the disturbing life cycle of the pearlfish, a creature that swims up sea cucumbers’ butts and eats their gonads.

Adrift’s Global Interactive Ocean Map
Inspired by research that followed 29,000 rubber duckies lost at sea and the unexpected locales where they ended up, this map is a quirky—but troubling—way to visualize pollution and its far-reaching effects on our planet. Click anywhere in the ocean on Adrift’s interactive map, and then sit back and watch where the trash you just dumped into the water will drift in one year, two years, 10 years. The map focuses on plastic waste, which is often the worst offender—it’s not biodegradable and can ensnare and poison marine life in devastating ways. The scientific tracking methods used by the map also apply to irradiated debris strewn in the ocean after the Fukushima disaster. Oh my, it didn’t take long for that to hit the coast of California, did it?

Medicine Is a Battlefield. Here’s How to Stay in the Know

Supporters of the Afforable Care Act rally outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on June 25, 2015. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images

Science, it’s been said, is a full-contact sport. Even when it doesn’t reach the Supreme Court—from whence a crucial decision upholding Obamacare rumbled forth late last week—health care is constantly tangled up with policy.

And that war in medicine is long tenured. The road to basic research is a gauntlet. Translational medicine is in a mosh pit of competing interests. Clinical trials shift end points like a juking boxer. And if you’re following these streams you won’t miss a moment of the action.

Read the Eye on the FDA blogDo you really, really, really, really, really like reading about the FDA? You won’t be able to look away from Eye on the FDA. The author is a pharmaceutical lawyer, so he’s not the most unbiased source, but his takes are fair and his insights invaluable. Like his awesome piece on how apps like Periscope could affect pharmaceutical advertising. Or when he pointed out that the FDA had clandestinely changed its policy on blood donations from gay men. Even his weekly updates are gold mines of FDA scuttlebutt.

Follow Medical Skeptic on Twitter
Even though he hasn’t written a blog post in over two years, MedSkep still has one of the keenest eyes in health care. He doesn’t cover policy specifically, but his tweets are always on point with what’s important in medical news right now.

Read the Brookings Institute’s Health 360 blog
Health 360 is a bowl of health policy as perfect as little, small, wee bear’s porridge. Smart but not wonkish, fun but not dumb. Plus it casts a wide net, looking at health policy implications that affect society, economics, and what’s happening in lab. Their coverage of the Supreme Court’s ACA ruling has been awesome, ranging from the decision’s effects on the business of health, to in-depth analysis of Justices Scalia and Roberts’ differences of opinion.

Read An Ounce of Evidence blog
Ashish Jha—practicing doctor and health policy professor at Harvard—offers policy analysis with a side of scientific methodology. As his blog title implies, a thousand pounds of opinion matter far less than an ounce of data. His posts often begin esoteric—his latest looks at how well a little-discussed part of the Affordable Care Act is changing patient readmission rates—but soon broaden into insightful (and empirically backed) takeaways.

Science Fraud Getting You Down? Here’s Who You Can Trust

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You don’t have to look very far to get head-bangingly upset about the current state of medical and scientific research. Pfizer (maybe) hid evidence that Zoloft use by pregnant women caused heart defects in babies. GlaxoSmithKlein paid $3 billion in fines for a) generating a fake journal article saying Paxil was safe for kids b) paying doctors lavish speaker fees and using sham advisory boards to promote Wellbutrin for off-label use and c) failing to report that Avandia, a diabetes drug, could potentially cause heart problems.

Merck, for its part, is currently being accused of lying about the efficacy of its mumps vaccine in order to maintain its market monopoly on the drug.

And if you think the CDC is going to keep an eye out, well, no, they take a bunch of money from our pharma phriends. But, you say, the FDA, surely, they’re tracking bad research and informing the publi—oh wait no, actually not. And the American Medical Association isn’t exactly unbiased either—it makes money from selling information about doctors and their prescribing habits to drug companies for marketing purposes.

And you can’t necessarily just go straight to the source and trust an article in a “peer reviewed” journal either. Retractions because studies can’t be reproduced or because the authors made stuff up in the first place happenall the time.

Right, then. Who can you trust? Well, the truth is out there. Here’s where to start.

Sign up for emails from RetractionWatch
Part of the delight of Retraction Watch is that it exposes you to the many weird things that scientists study. Outer space dentistry? Check. Rabbit hepatitis? Check. The nutritional value of mushrooms? Yep. So that’s pretty fun, but then the less fun part is why are those guys lying about this stuff? As Jon Stewart famously said, It’s bad for America. And everyone else besides.

Go click around The Cochrane Library
The great thing about the Cochrane Collaboration is that they’re just so meta: They don’t look at one study, they don’t look at two. They look at dozens—hundreds even—of studies and assess the outcomes, the quality of the research, the potential for the results to be biased (like, say, if the studies are industry funded). It’s a relief to feel like you’re getting a straight answer on, say, antioxidants (meh), antibiotics (meh), fluoride (meh), coffee (meh). Topical NSAIDs for acute musculoskeletal pain in adults? YES!

Sign up for the Right Care Weekly newsletter at the Lown Institute
The Lown folks, dedicated to helping get medical care to people who need it, and prevent people from getting medical care they don’t need, collect up the week’s best medical reporting, drawing attention to pieces on conflict of interest, end of life care, Medicare fraud… the works. If you’re looking for a roundup of in depth stories that go beyond Dole-funded research into bananas as food for cyclists (I mean come on), look here.

Check out TheNNT.com
We’ve written about our pals at The NNT before. They review the reviews (often drawing on Cochrane research) and give a simple red-yellow-green light to various medical treatments. Does your doc want you to take a hypertensive? Epinephrine? You might get a second opinion by looking up the suggested treatment here and using that as the basis for a conversation.

Got more sources for good clean science? Send ’em our way. Lord knows we need more of them.

Follow Friday: Exploring the Wild World of Botany

Astrophysicists get to study the whole wide universe. Evolutionary biologists get to study the very origins of life. Botanists, they get…plants. It’s a humble field. In Harry Potter terms, it’s like skipping the fun Hogwarts classes—Dark Arts, Charms, Care of Magical Animals—in favor of Herbology.

And indeed, interest in botany is declining. In the past 25 years, the number of research universities offering botany degrees has been cut in half, and other universities are closing or culling their collections of plant specimens, which are vital for botany studies. This is no good—as the science journal Nature points out in a recent op-ed, “botany underpins the modern world, not only agriculture, but medicine, material science, and chemistry.” So for this Follow Friday, let’s give plants a little love. They could use it.

JSTOR Global Plants Twitter feed
Botanists stare at dead leaves, petals, and seeds all day, which doesn’t sound like an exciting way to pass the time. But a glimpse at JSTOR Global Plants’ massive online collection of specimens from botanical gardens around the world may change your mind. Learn about the impressive genetics behind beefsteak tomatoes’ mammoth size. Peer at the vivid red blooms of Aloe antonii Castillon, sampled all the way from Madagascar. Notice how a 125-year-old Tulipa gesneriana L. specimen still retains its delicate beauty:

The PlantNet App
Calling all citizen scientists! Our planet’s forests are full of trees and plants that await discovery by you, yes you! What you do is download an app called PlantNet. Then you snap shots of plants you encounter and upload them to its ever-growing database for identification. And you get some help too (call it a symbiotic relationship). If you upload a smartphone shot of a flower or tree that’s already in the system, PlantNet will tell you what you’re looking at. It’s like magic, but better—it’s science! At the moment, the app focuses on native French flora (it was created by French botanists), but its database will eventually expand.

Science writer Jennifer Frazer’s blog and Twitter feed
On Twitter and on her Artful Ameoba blog over at Scientific American, Jennifer Frazer marvels at the plants, fungi, and tiny creatures that form the backbone of our world. You probably never knew that the wheat has a shocking and somewhat creepy pedigree. Or that dying trees feed their healthy neighbors through a “wood-wide web.” And this new fern’s parents overcame a lot to fertilize each other:

Global Forest Watch
Trees sustain all life on earth, from the animals and insects that live in them to the humans inhabiting megacities. And our planet inhales and exhales the oxygen they generate based on when trees are in bloom in the spring and when their leaves are decaying in the winter. So deforestation is a big deal, and Global Forest Watch’s interactive map lets you track it as it’s happening around the world. Northern Brazil, China, and Russia look like their forests are being stripped bare. Happily, you can see forest gains, too: The American South, Europe, and southern Brazil are giving their trees room to grow.

Morphing Mushroom Identifier
We know, we know, mushrooms and other fungi aren’t technically plants (they’re closer to animals, actually). But scientists have long grouped their field of study—mycology—with botany. If you’re one of those daring foragers who roams forests to find and eat wild mushrooms, or if you just want to know if that shroom your kid/dog/cat ate in the backyard is poisonous, you’ll love the interactive Morphing Mushroom Identifier. Choosing from an image catalog, you input the size, shape, and texture of the shrooms in question, and the identifier helps you identify what kind of mushroom you’re looking at. (Is your fungi cone-shaped? Does it have spiny spores? What about gills?) You’ll pick up some survival skills if you’re ever stranded in the wild, and yes—you’ll get really good at identifying psychedelic mushrooms.

The Amazing Science Teachers You Wish You Had in School

I had some amazing science teachers growing up. Steve Cooperman was so kind. And Garcia Stone (not his real name, he never told us his real name, but he was rumored to run a bike shop and cook, um, products for Hells Angels, Walter White-style) let us make contact explosives and brew up esters which were supposed to smell delicious but actually smelled disgusting, especially when the vials broke and fragranced my parents’ car. This week, we asked you for your favorite science educators to follow. The results are inspiring.

Follow Chad Orzel on Twitter
Well, if you’re a college student, you had better start following Chad Orzel right away, because he provides some key insights into the professorial brain. And joke lovers, well, you can’t beat a good precision vs accuracy line. Oh, and right, the serious science. Well, if you need the LHC / 13 TeV explained to you, well, he’s your guy for that too.
Suggested by Rhett Allain

Follow Kate Clancy on Twitter
One thing we have to do if we want to see more women in science is get used to seeing more women in science. Following biological anthropologist Kate Clancy, who recently started the hashtag #girlswithtoys, is a step in the right direction. Lots of retweets of girls and young women building robots and wielding power tools, plus a fiercely strong stand against rape culture. (Why do I even have to write those words?)
Suggested by Rhett Allain

Follow Rhett Allain on Twitter
Notice how the first two suggestions here were suggested by Rhett Allain? Well, now we will suggest you follow Rhett Allain. Because darn it, his posts on the physics of various pop culture icons make you want to back to school. Is R2-D2 flying correctly? How big is a banana in Fruit Ninja? What happens to an out of control spacecraft? Rhett works it out for you in ways that make everything seem so simple, so grokkable, that you almost feel you could teach a class yourself.

Follow Ken Lacovara on Twitter
First tweet I see: “How to save the environment? “Elevate the status of women…” This is relevant to my interests! Reading on, oh, yes, now he’s retweeting the New Horizons mission and the upcoming Pluto flyby. Yes yes, this paleontology professor has got my number. A thing now about bladeless wind turbines. Weird, but ok. And now, a cute kid holding a fossil stingray. Ken! Imma follow you now, OK? OK!

Follow Margaret Rubega on Twitter
You know what Twitter needs? More ornithologists. Get it? Because of the twee… oh never mind. But anyway, if you like pictures of cute birdies, alive and less so, you should follow this Connecticut state bird lady and professor. Do all states have an official ornithologist? That would be a feather in your cap. But first you would have to break a few eggs. Okokok, enough with the cheep jokes. Just get your bird on, is all we’re saying.

Go Here for Sweet International Science, You Xenophobe You

You know what your problem is? You fail to imagine a world outside the United States. You’re just not thinking about other countries, you know? Cuba, Russia, Canada. They might as well not exist, to look at your Twitter stream, what with its tweets from the CDC and the EPA and the FDA and the TSA and the … we’ll just stop there. Well, we can help you conquer your unwitting chauvinism with a few suggested non-US social media follows.

Follow Roscosmos on YouTube
Rockets rockets rockets rockets rockets. Gaagh, and there’s a rocket on a special rocket TRAIN. A rocket train, there is a special train for rockets!
And don’t give me that excuse that you don’t speak Russian. Whatever. You don’t have to speak Russian for the overhead view of Earth around minute one of this video to make your stomach drop.

It took us, like, 25 minutes to write this blurb because we couldn’t stop scrolling down for more jolts of Animals Doing Amazing Things. The lion mom with her itty-bitty cubs trotting down the road. Some rhinos snuzzling. A deer-kinda-thingie. Good for your occasional creature hit with a dose of culture to boot.

Look, I know, and you know, exactly what CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is really for: To open up a doorway to a parallel universe so that the greys and the reptilians can have easier access to our government offices and precious bodily fluids. But the CERN officials, they continue to maintain that they’re just “examining dark matter” and “looking for Higgs bosons.” So fine, let them give you their official updates on some of the most amazing physics research being done today (they collided particles at 13 TeV for the first time ever yesterday!).

Follow the BC Ministry of Transportation on Twitter (or not, since you probably don’t live there) Number of followers of the New York Department of Transportation’s Twitter feed: 59K. Number of people who live in New York: 8.4 million. Number of followers of British Columbia’s transportation Twitter Feed: 46K. Number of people who live in British Columbia: 4.6 million. In your face New York City DOT! In! Your! Face! Per inhabitant, British Columbia has you pwnd! Woooo woooooo. Take that NYC! Suggested by @P_Lavoie

Follow the US Department of the Interior on Instagram
OK so now you, international people, this message is for you. The photos on the US Department of the Interior’s Instagram feed are all totally calendar-worthy and will make you want to come visit us. Which you should do, really, because it’s lovely here. Foxes, sunsets, canyons of varying grandeur. It’s just really …. nice and soothing.

Where to Find the Best (Scientific) Explosions on the Web

Huge constructions, loud noises, insane visual effects, mad geniuses, and liberties taken with the laws of physics. It’s not a summer blockbuster—it’s science! Spectacular science—or big fat kaboom kablooeys—is essential to support discoveries in energy, physics, and materials testing for buildings, weapons and more. We’ve compiled a few of our favorite places on the web where you can experience the large-scale and explosive industrial, chemical, and engineering research taking place around the country.

Chemistry In Pictures
Chemical & Engineering News hosts an eye-popping Tumblr photoblog of the most visually stunning photos in current chemistry research and demonstrations. Oh yeah, and the information is good too. Soak up imagery ranging from lab-confined bottled lightning to titanic mountains of sulfur. The best part: Readers and chemistry fans on the Internet can contribute to the blog themselves, by uploading their own photos to Facebook and Twitter using the #CENChemPics hashtag or emailing the blog directly at CENChemPics@acs.org.

Photonicinduction For hard-core bombast, the people at the Photonoicinduction channel on YouTube have you covered, with a collection of videos for people working in electrical engineering. Videos range from cute experiments, to large demos full of volatile explosions and blinding light. Do not try these things at home—but feel free to watch the videos over and over.

Sandia National Laboratories The two research campuses (in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Livermore, California) that make up Sandia National Laboratories both take part in an extraordinary amount of industrial science and technology development. One of their biggest recent breakthroughs was a self-guided bullet, but the lab is also involved in fields like nuclear power. Keep up with them on Twitter.

Windyty’s incredible wind pattern mapWindyty is a mesmerizing, searchable, interactive map of wind patterns around the world. Not only is it beautiful to look at, it’s packed with information: You can search for a specific location, zoom in and out to see granular details, toggle along a timeline to see past and future wind patterns, and expand to see detailed weather forecasts. Prepare to settle in—you’re going to be playing with this thing for a while.

Follow him on Twitter for breaking stories and awe-inspiring photos of weather patterns—a satisfying combination of technical knowledge and straight-up weather love. His technical chops feed your brain, and his love for the forces of nature feed your heart.

Karl the Fog on InstagramKarl the Fog embodies San Francisco’s mysterious microclimates, tracking the city’s infamous fog as it shifts around the city. San Franciscans need to follow him to know how many layers of polar fleece to stuff in their messenger bags; shorts-wearing in-landers need to follow him so they can point and laugh at our bone-chilling summer days.

Fascinating Science Databases to Get Lost in for Days

Databases are rad. You click this, toggle that, and you surface little bits of the captured world that have been tumbled into a digital hat, one from which you can produce surprising, shocking, sad facts to share with the people around you. We’ve collected some of our favorites for this week’s Follow Friday. Only it’s not so much a Follow Friday as a fall-down-the-rabbit-hole all weekend kind of situation.

CropScape at the National Agricultural Statistics Service
So then you’re all like, oh, I wonder what kind of crops they grow in the United States, and hey wow, there’s so much corn in Minnesota, and ooooh look at all that cotton in the Texas panhandle, that’s amazing, and also in California, hey wait, I live in San Francisco, let’s zoom in to see what’s around here, oh of course, they grow soooooo much stuff in the Central Valley, and those purple dots in Napa, those are grapes, duh, oh, and that’s a funny pocket of alfalfa there and suddenly it’s half an hour later and you’re kind of hungry.

Related Posts

The CDC’s Traumatic Occupational Injury database
We’re not proud of this one, but we have to confess a certain ghoulish attraction to lists and charts of how people get killed or injured at work. Because how else are you going to know that between 1995 and 2000, of 10,000 percutaneous injuries caused by medical devices, 29 percent were caused by hypodermic needles and 7 percent were caused by scalpels? But then you find a listing of childhood agricultural injuries by body part and your stomach kind of lurches. (The good news: Those kinds of injuries dropped by around 50 percent between 2001 and 2012.)

A view of the planet Kepler-47c and its binary suns, as seen from a hypothetical icy moon. Stocktrek/AP

And now, onward to a place where no one gets hurt because no one is there. Quick: Which exoplanet has a really big giant radius? Planet ROXs 42B b! Ok good. Now let’s plot the calculated temperature against year of discovery! Looking pretty hot there, Kepler-70b, bring your sunscreen, amiright? Because when the alien overlords finally make landfall, you’re going to want a little background on their homeworld so you can make ingratiating conversation.
Suggested by Johnny Peruvian

The GM approval database at the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech ApplicationsDo you eat food? Or make food? No, we mean, make food. Like say you’re an eggplant researcher and you want to know what other egg-heads have been doing with that purple monstrosity. You go here and discover that there’s a fancy insect-resistant eggplant approved in Bangladesh, and if you ask us, that’s all the eggplant (of any kind) the world needs. Go home, you’re done, eggplantologist. Click around more to see, say, what Monsanto’s up to as well. There’s a Roundup-Ready wheat that exists. Did not know that.
Suggested by Ben Schaefer

BugGuide.net
What is that bee-you-ti-ful iridescent blue beetle you found on your car the other day? Why, a Fiery Searcher, of course! Ooh, and there’s a praying mantis with prey. If you like to look at bug pictures the way others like to look at baby pictures (or, if you find bugs alarming, the way some people like watching Nascar) BugGuide’s got you covered. Did you know that the bumble flower beetle looks like a tiny Chewbacca? So cute!

Want the Latest Science News? Here’s Who to Follow

If you want to follow the latest science news, may we suggest following people who make their living following and writing the latest science news? (Guess we didn’t need a Ph.D. to figure that one out.) Shift your IQ a little further right on the bell curve with a daily dose of the following science journalists.

Follow @edyong209
Whether he’s taking selfies with a flayed komodo dragon or making really bad science puns, Ed Yong needs to be in your stream. Or, if you’re trying to limit your Twitter screen time, just sign up for his newsletter, The Ed’s Up (see? The puns, they slay) or follow his blog Not Exactly Rocket Science over at National Geographic.

Follow @KateGalbraith
Water, energy, drought, fracking, water, solar, nuclear, water. We here in the desiccated California-based Wired offices are very interested in what Kate Galbraith has to tweet about. And if you care about the climate and the environment (you do, don’t you?) you should take an interest too, even if you live somewhere lush and green.

Why are people worried about #Egypt & #H5N1 bird flu? Check out this epi-curve of H5 infections. Egypt is in yellow. — Helen Branswell (@HelenBranswell) April 16, 2015

Follow @HelenBranswell
Her Twitter feed might make you want to wash your hands (and you, you with the cough, go stand in the corner over there) but if you’re into infectious diseases—MERS, HthisNthat, polio—you need to follow Branswell.

Follow @CarlZimmer
If you’re into the microbiome, Zimmer’s your guy, of course, but his curation of the world of science, from evolution to declining sea ice to CRISPR will get your brain ready for the day, whether or not you tend to revel in the idea that you’re constantly teaming with squillions of organisms.

Where to Find the Cutest, Most Amazing Animals on the Web

The internet isn’t run by techies, the Beygency, or the FCC. It’s ruled by the animals that mesmerize us with their cute antics in GIFs, photos, and videos. But the animals of the web aren’t just busy falling down and not being able to get up, or winning our hearts with a sneeze. They’re also incredibly important—whether as research subjects or harbingers of climate change. Here’s a list of some of our favorite animal scientists, writers, and photo feeds that you should follow for a daily serving of cute, with a side of knowledge.

The ZooBorns Instagram feed, which features photos of baby animals from zoos around the world, is mostly about animals at their tiniest and most adorable. (Fennec fox kits! Sloths! Pangolins!) So squeee away, but don’t forget that each time you get all mushy about an Emperor chick, you also, in some small way, cast a vote for preserving biodiversity and wilderness everywhere. It’s a penguin win-win.

The California Academy of Sciences Twitter feed brings you all the important animal science news, from sperm whale necropsy updates to info on the gender split in tool-using chimps (hint: it’s the ladies).

The WTF, Evolution?! Tumblr is the sketch comedy routine of the animal kingdom. As impressive as evolution is, it has produced some wacky solutions for survival. This feed points out, and laughs at, the resulting bizarre appendages, shapes, and life cycles. Take the sloth: It depends on a combination of algae, rainwater, moths, and a monthly trip to the forest floor to poop. WTF, Evolution?!

WIRED’s own Matt Simon curates a weekly freak show of Absurd Creatures, from the terrifying, deadly Bobbitt worm to the scary-smart cuttlefish to the adorable axolotl that regenerates its limbs. Simon interviews the scientists that study these odd animals and the incredible adaptations they’ve come up with to survive in strange environments or gain a competitive reproductive edge. Pro tip: The photo captions are chuckle-inducing Easter eggs; don’t miss ’em.

#IAmAScientistBecause Isn’t the Only Feed You Should Follow

You are a scientist because, because why? If you’re not already following the hashtag, go set up your filter now; it blew up our Twitter stream this week. Our faves were the images, like dynamite (kersplowie!) the slinkysmooth rhinochimaeras (awwww!)
and an awful landscape (sigh).

Follow Eric Topol on Twitter
Medical research is all well and good, but what does it mean for me? Author, cardiologist, and Medscape editor in chief Eric Topol collects up smart insights from around the web from big data stuff to breast cancer stuff (and the intersection of the two).

Follow Smarter Every Day on YouTube
Why do cats land on their feet? This is explained with the remarkably chill cat Gigi. What happens to babies’ hearts after they are born? This is explained with Destin’s actual new baby born a few weeks ago. (Video might trigger your allergies, so get a Kleenex.) How do you get your self to the International Space Station? This is explained with an actual Soyuz capsule. Why are you not already following Smarter Every Day on YouTube? This cannot be explained. Suggested by Ben Reis.

Follow Science Porn on Twitter Come for the ravioli stingrays, stay for what’s basically a love song to the funnest, prettiest, inspiringest stuff the world’s PhDs have to offer.

Follow Science Humor on Pinterest How do you tell the difference between a train conductor and a chemist? Ask them to spell “unionised”! Yuk yuk yuk. Chemistry Cat is there too of course. And pickup lines that act as good date screeners (I want to be Adenine so I can be paired with U).

Follow John Baez on Google+ If you think this is hilarious, you’re probably already following John Baez on Google+ (don’t tell anyone we don’t get the joke and we won’t tell anyone that you hang out on Google+). If science fiction and tiling problems are more your speed, just for their fanciful good looks, you’ll get a kick out of him, too. Suggested by Simon Foster.

The Science Blogs, Twitter Feeds, and Channels We Love

We read a lot. (And we like to look at pretty pictures too.) And you read a lot—we know because we asked you who you follow on Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook and other social media sources and the answers flooded in. We plucked out a few, and we’ll be presenting you with more smart science feeds to follow in the coming weeks. Nominate your favorites here.

Follow The Daily Cosmos on Instagram
Colorized images of space are a bit of a guilty pleasure—awe-inspiring, but they also remind us of a cheap space-cowboy book cover, somehow. Whatever. If you can’t revel a little bit in the glories of the heavens, your soul is a crumbly lame earthbound thing, frankly.

Follow Buzz Hoot Roar on Facebook
Feed your brain and your eyeballs with periodic posts that succinctly explain science concepts. The illustrations are by a different designer each time, and they are delightful. (Suggested by @might_could)

Follow the Junk Charts Blog
If you, as we do, spend your days fretting over the sizes of proportional circles, or arguing about the scope of an axis, or wondering how on earth you’re going to present a colossal database of numbers in a leetle pithy chart, you are going to love Junk Charts. All the mistakes you try not to make, ever, are collected up by Kaiser Fung and presented, with commentary, for your schadenfreudish dissecting pleasure. Just hope you never end up in his crosshairs.